Common sense was in short supply

Both Newsweek and the government bear blame in the Koran desecration controversy

WASHINGTON — The first thing that anyone in any profession should draw on is common sense. This is particularly important in journalism, where we deal not in those infinite theological or ideological "truths," but rather in the little relative truths that at best keep us reasonably sane in our everyday life.

But of all the endless (and mostly tedious) analyses of the Newsweek story, about an interrogator at Guantanamo Bay insulting the Muslim holy book, the Koran, by supposedly flushing it down a toilet to threaten prisoners, it seems few have paused to apply common sense.

I just took a moment, for instance, to peruse my old Koran, which I purchased and read when I started covering the Middle East for the Chicago Daily News in 1969. It is a humongous book, in English, 1,813 pages in all. It is also tightly bound, and it would frankly be difficult for anyone to flush it down anything. And yet, everyone simply accepts that central proposition.

Were they talking about tearing out pages? That would take hours. Were they talking about destroying it in the bathroom and thus humiliating Muslims everywhere? One searches for sense.

I tell young journalists when they're looking for a phone number for someone, try the phone book; when you come up against a story like this, apply a little common sense. The problem is that, while we still have phone books, there seems to be little common sense in the country today.

Listen, first, to the Newsweek side. The Newsweek editors first hemmed and hawed, acknowledging the accusation that the story was false, but not retracting it. They had "sources," they said; they had checked it with the Pentagon for 11 days and nobody there objected; their major correspondent, Michael Isikoff, is unquestionably one of the best investigative and descriptive journalists around.

And yet, they were wrong--and their error could be attributed to, I believe, the mad scramble for journalistic ratings. Even among our professionals, that scramble becomes a kind of journalistic NASCAR race. And in this case, being wrong means setting much of Afghanistan ablaze.

But the most revealing words came from Isikoff.

"Whenever something like this happens," he was quoted in The New York Times, "you've got to take stock and review what you did--how the story was handled. The big point that leaps out is the cultural one [my emphasis]. Neither Newsweek nor the Pentagon foresaw that a reference to the desecration of the Koran was going to create the kind of response that it did."

They didn't?

Listen, then, to the government's side. The White House, the Pentagon and the State Department were furious about the story and about the riots in Afghanistan, which seemed to be undoing much of what they had created over the last two years. Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said huffily, "People died because of this."

True; but an awful lot of people have died from this administration's mistakes, and there has been precious little mourning around here for all those dead Iraqis and Afghans. And the last two years have been replete with insults to Muslims by American troops in Iraq--they are "ragheads," Americans invade mosques and live in them, Muslim homes are not respected.

Tellingly, on the day (May 16) that this story was at its height in Washington, in Baghdad the new Iraqi government announced that it had ordered the army to stop raiding mosques, arresting clerics and "terrifying worshipers." And it is hardly something new that insurgents have been mistreated at Guantanamo--British prisoners released from there, as well as the FBI, the State Department and the Red Cross, have long attested to that.

Are there any lessons from these unfortunate--and humanly costly--events of the last week? Surely.

One is that the press needs to be far more careful, especially of those still apparently unknown but absolutely central cultural roots of a war like this. (How could they not have figured this?)

But another lesson is that this government is getting exactly what it deserves. With its imbecilic secrecy everywhere--particularly in all those "secret prisons" the CIA and Special Forces are running all over the world--there is no way for even the most sincere and searching journalist to know what is going on, especially in an atmosphere from the top that treats Muslims like pawns on a chessboard.

As the government goes its obsessively suspicious way, anonymous sources sometimes become the only sources. In the end, the government is at least as guilty as Newsweek.